SIDRA SUBZWARI
ANGELL HASMAN & ASSOCIATES REALTY
Sidra Subzwari is an exemplar of dedication and is a trusted residential real estate expert in White Rock, BC. She has a diverse sales portfolio, an extensive international network and a comprehensive understanding of the real estate market. In order to deliver the greatest value to her clients – whether they are buyers, sellers, developers or investors – Sidra focuses on one thing above all others: the client.
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
Born into a family of architects, Sidra was raised in Arizona and lived in North Dakota for 5 years before her family moved, and ultimately settled in British Columbia. In her early years, she developed a keen interest in architecture and entrepreneurship. Eager to build a business of her own, she applied and was invited to join an international organization in which she travelled around the globe to learn from world leaders that mentored her from a young age.
She now brings 10+ years of sales and marketing experience, alongside honed
negotiation skills. From inception to closing, Sidra ensures client satisfaction through hard work, unrivalled perseverance, diligence, and innovative thinking. Sidra’s success has allowed her to give back in her local community, as well as to support global initiatives that are creating a better future for all. She has supported the Peace Arch Hospital Foundation in White Rock, Richard Branson’s Virgin Unite Foundation, and the Sylvia Earle Alliance – Mission Blue.
Back in Vancouver, Concord Pacific has built 57 highrises on the 208-acre Expo site, with 13 to 15 more planned, says senior vice-president of sales Grant Murray. Since acquiring a tract of land east of the CN Tower in 1998, the company led by Terry Hui is also on its 35th tower in Toronto's Cityplace. And in its first foreign project, Concord has teamed up with Toronto-based Brookfield Office Properties and the U.K.'S W1 Developments Ltd. to build a 50-storey residential tower with some 310 suites in East London's gentrifying Shoreditch district. The Principal Tower will open in about two and a half years, says Murray, who adds that Concord has bought another London property. “We're very keen on having a presence in London and getting our name well known there as well as Asia.”
Concert Properties Ltd. hasn't ventured abroad, but it works in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario. The company, which has 225 employees and started out building rental apartments in Vancouver in 1989, went into Ontario in 2001, says president and CEO Brian Mccauley. Concert has since built about 2,400 rental housing units in Toronto.
B.C. developers always had to compete with seasoned rivals in their own backyard, says Mccauley, whose company is directly owned by 19 Canadian pension plans. “We learned very quickly that if we wanted to acquire sites in Vancouver proper or in Metro Vancouver, we had to sharpen our pencil, put our best foot forward and be aggressive.”
Seeing opportunities that local developers in other cities don't—and being prepared to take risks—has been another advantage, Mccauley maintains. “I know that was the case when Concert came into the Toronto market back in 2001,” he says. “No one was building purpose-built residential in Toronto and hadn't been doing it for a dozen years or more.”
Westbank's first development outside B.C. was Azure, a luxury Dallas highrise that opened in 1998. For one of three Seattle projects, the company is planning to turn a Belltown parking lot at 3rd Avenue and Virginia Street into 500 apartments atop 100,000 square feet of office space. “If I had to buy that site today, as an example, I'd be bidding against all Canadian guys,” founder Gillespie says. “There would not be one developer from Seattle.”
Why not? First, the Canadian and U.S. banking systems are very different, Gillespie explains. Westbank's first Seattle project is with a Canadian lender that will take a $350-million loan. “There's no American lender that could put a $350-million loan on their books,” Gillespie says. “You'd have to stick six American lenders in that deal.”
The U.S. has thousands of banks, but seven firms dominate in Canada. “Those seven have built up a really strong expertise in real estate lending,” Gillespie says. “You go talk to real estate lenders at American banks and Canadian banks, the Canadian bank lenders would run circles around them.”
The second reason is that many U.S. developers got wiped out in the Great
Recession of 2007-09. Canada didn't suffer the same calamity, partly thanks to the strength of its banking and regulatory systems, Gillespie says.
The third reason: Canadian development expertise. “They can build single-family homes like nobody's business,” Gillespie says of U.S. developers. “They're just not as good at building the type of building typologies that you need for a walkable, dense urban environment. And it isn't as simple as putting up taller buildings; there's a lot more that goes into it.”
At B+B Scale Models Ltd.'s cluttered Granville Island studio, Bernd Zwick shows off his company's exquisitely detailed work. In one corner: a streetscape of downtown Vancouver highlighting Westbank's proposed luxury residential project at Burrard and Nelson, a curved 56-storey tower designed by Bing Thom Architects. B+B has built models for developments in Hawaii, Zwick says, pointing to a shelf filled with rows of tiny palm trees. “We don't grow them; we just make them,” jokes the German expat.
Zwick, who co-founded B+B in 1969 and looks a decade younger than his 73 years, now has local rivals, but he's the grandfather of architectural model making in Vancouver. He began working for American clients in the 1980s; that business took off during the next decade, thanks to exposure from Intrawest. But Zwick knows all too well how prone America is to booms and busts. By 2007, as much as three-quarters of B+B'S output went to the U.S. Then came the 2008 crash. Zwick went four years without a single American job, and his staff dwindled from 43 to fewer than 20 today.
Westbank and other local clients helped fill the gap, and international customers began trickling back. Since 2012, B+B has done U. S. work for Bosa Development, Pittsburgh-based Urban Design Associates and Dallas-headquartered Howard Hughes Corp. Zwick admits that over the past 10 years, he hasn't chased business south of the border because Vancouver has kept him so busy. “Maybe we should have kept better in touch than we did,” he says.
Reflecting on how his work has changed, Zwick notes that B+B now uses lasers to cut the pieces for its models, a task once done by hand. “It was much slower, of course,” he recalls of the old days. “But the architecture was simpler then.”
A developer building a project in Los Angeles has good reason to hire Zwick, contends Westbank's Gillespie. “Shipping the model down costs you almost as much as the model costs,” he says. “So, why do they do it here? Well, because A, he's the best model maker in the world, and B, because probably his architects are here.”
In nearby Kitsilano, Glotman Simpson's one-storey headquarters belie the fact that the structural engineering firm has worked on about 500 highrises in Canada and the U.S. Managing principal Geoffrey Glotman explains that during the 1970s his father, who founded the business in 1964, did what he believes was Vancouver's first condo development. Locally, Glotman Simpson's projects include the Vancouver Convention Centre and the Richmond Oval, but highrises account for much of its work. In downtown San Diego alone, his firm has engineered some 50 such towers, the powerfully built Glotman says. “Most of the highrise stuff down there, the large majority is Canadian developers, and they're all using Canadian architects.”
Glotman Simpson, which has offices in Calgary and Los Angeles, followed companies such as Bosa Development, Intergulf, Onni, Pinnacle International and Westbank up the West Coast, Glotman explains. “We have so much experience out of Canada in terms of doing the built environment and highrises here,” Glotman says. “You would think the U.S. has it. They don't.”
Glotman, whose firm is working for Westbank in Toronto as well as Seattle, also finds Canadians more cooperative than their litigious American counterparts. “The ability to work with the teams here is just so easy, fast, doesn't require a whole bunch of meetings, contracts, all the peripheral stuff,” he says. “We just get down to work.”
Wise to Canadian expertise, large U.S. contractors have been hiring his firm, Glotman says. Roughly 40 per cent of Glotman Simpson's work is now for
stateside clients, he reckons. Meanwhile, B.C. subtrades have built a clientele down south. For example, Burnaby- based Newway Concrete Forming Ltd. has a Seattle branch. LMS Reinforcing Steel Group and Starline Windows Ltd., both headquartered in Surrey, have outposts in California and Washington State, respectively.
Like B+B'S Zwick, Glotman fell victim to the 2008 meltdown: from 30 to 40 per cent of his business, jobs in Southern California fell to zero. “Right now, I can say to you that we have a ton of work in the U.S. and everything's fantastic, but they tend to build up and then they have a crash,” he says. “I'm not sure how long this real estate cycle will last in the U.S.”
As the province's engineers and subtrades make a big impression in America, its architects have gone global. Don Kasian reckons that as much as two-thirds of his firm's work is outside B.C., in places like the Middle East, Europe and China. “Going through a number of recessions in the world, you realize that diversity is really important,” says the president of Kasian Architecture Interior Design and Planning Ltd., 120 of whose 350 staff work in Vancouver. “Plus you can grow. You have more things to practise on, and you get better.”
Bing Thom Architects ( BTA) operates out of a low-slung building in the shadow of the Burrard Bridge, but the 50-employee firm also has offices in Hong Kong and Washington, D.C. Principal Michael Heeney, who joined BTA in 1989, explains that founder Bing Thom designed several pavilions for Expo 86 early in his career. That led to projects in Thom's native Hong Kong during the 1990s, when BTA also won an international competition to design the new northeastern Chinese city of Dalian.
The firm's work on UBC'S Chan Centre for the Performing Arts, completed in 1997, has helped it land commissions such as Xiqu Centre, a Us$350-million Chinese opera house in Hong Kong that is scheduled for completion next year. Although BTA mostly does institutional architecture, it works with Westbank—as Heeney told colleagues at a recent conference in Philadelphia. “They said—and this was someone who doesn't live in Vancouver—
`It's only every 20 or 30 years you get a visionary like Ian Gillespie doing the kind of stuff he does.'”
Gillespie is leading the pack, Heeney asserts. “He's taking what he's learned here, and he's exporting it to places like Toronto and Seattle. And he's working in Tokyo. And what's interesting is he's now learning from those places and bringing that back here as well.”
Heeney thinks the federal government could do more to support Canadian architectural firms' work abroad. As he points out, many European countries subsidize their architects to enter international design competitions. For instance, France does so because it knows that those firms will specify French windows if they win. “The economic value of architectural services is profoundly undervalued by government,” Heeney says. “The architectural fees are just a small percentage of the project. But then we bring all of this influence in terms of what gets built so these Canadian products can be exported.”
Heeney cites BTA'S innovative use of zinc cladding on the Canadian pavilion at Expo 92 in Seville, Spain. Canada is the world's top zinc producer, and this work spawned an industry now worth hundreds of millions of dollars, he says. “That's the value of architects working abroad, is they can have this huge industrial impact in Canada.”
The broader development and design community could make the same case. In our culture, real estate development doesn't have a glamorous or even a positive image, planning consultant Larry Beasley observes. “At UBC, I teach my students not to objectify the development community or developers, because in a sense they're subtly being taught that anyway,” he says. “The impact that development as an industry has on the economy of this city probably is undervalued.”
What can be done to change that attitude? “I guess you could have a policy approach, and you could have government doing some of the things they do to facilitate, say, high tech,” Beasley says. “But part of it also has to do with the industry, and the industry finding ways to tell its own stories and brand itself differently.”
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